


Seasons Greasons

by orphan



Series: Omeletteverse [5]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Precursor Emissary Newton Geiszler, basically curtainfic, rich people parties, uhh oh it's newt's pov...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:06:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28035138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: Lars is having his annual end-of-year rich person do. Newt is not invited. Hermann brings him anyway.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Series: Omeletteverse [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974679
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	Seasons Greasons

**Author's Note:**

> Not one but _two_ not-Christmasy "Christmas" fics. Yike.
> 
> Mild **content warning** for parts of this, particularly some ableism near the end. Also Newt's whole... thing. I guess, including references to alcoholism and drug use. I told myself when I originally wrote _Inside Here_ that I'd never write Newt-POV for this 'verse because ~mystery or whatever but ahahaha yeah that was never going to last.
> 
> Also lol at these all bring posted out of chronological order. This is set about a year after "The Non-Denominational Mid-Seasonal Soap Club" and two after _Inside Here_.

Suresh brings them the envelope.

“Hey. Um, Doc? I can give this to you, right?”

“Huh?” Newt is twenty thousand words into a write-up of the improvements to the k-core interface and hasn’t focused on anything further away than their knees for . . . shit. Three solid hours. Meaning it takes even their eyes a few blinks to focus on where Suresh is hovering next to the lab couch, cream envelope in hand.

(The _new_ lab couch. Newt still can’t believe Hermann went like a whole decade without a couch. _“They gave me an office, Newton. It wasn’t a priority.”_ Well, it was a priority for Newt. Like hell they’re going to do paperwork sitting in a _chair_.)

“It’s addressed to Doctor Gottlieb,” Suresh is saying. “I can, um. I can take it to him if it’s—”

“Nah. Nah, it’s cool. Hand it over.” Hermann’s just down the hall and Newt probably could do with the walk. They’re not gonna make the kids deliver their mail.

The envelope’s definitely Hermann’s, firstly by dint of being addressed to “Doctor H. Gottlieb PhD, Director K-Science PPDC” and secondly by the fact it’s not opened. The Corps opens all Newt’s mail before it gets passed on, which honestly they don’t mind, given pretty much the only things they get by post nowadays are either, a) death threats, b) weird k-cult solicitations, c) media requests, or d) job offers. Also occasionally kaiju-themed arts and crafts, because humans are basically crazy, and Newt has an entire shelf in the office dedicated to a bizarre array of hand-stitched kaiju plushies and a whole drawer of matching knitted goods. There’s even a Slattern Hanukkah sweater, which Newt wore exactly once before Hermann threatened divorce, and which will definitely see the light of day again next year when said incident has been forgotten.

Meanwhile: envelope.

It’s thick paper, obviously some kind of card, hand-lettered in chisel-nibbed copperplate. Something about it feels weirdly familiar, though Newt can’t place it until they turn the envelope over and see the return address.

“Hah!” They lurch upright, tablet tossed aside and forgotten.“Oh, damn. That’s right.”

“Is everything okay?”

Newt waves off Suresh’s concern. “Family shit,” they say. “All good.” Definitely an overstatement.

They find Hermann in Lab C, surrounded by a gaggle of his little nerd squad, in the middle of wailing on a slab of biocrete with a sledgehammer. He’s been working on a new generation colony matrix that should heal bigger impacts more effectively; the current stuff does great with cracks but not so great with replacing whole missing chunks, but Herms thinks they’re pretty close to a solution on the more complex shape-memory recall. Which of course involves bashing a lot of holes in walls with a sledgehammer “for science,” and Newt never was one to complain about Hermann flashing a bit of sexy forearm in the workplace.

They only get in a minute or so of quality ogling time before one of the nerd squad notices them and mentions it to Hermann. Which, okay. K-tech gets its own labs for a reason, specifically that most of the rest of k-science is still utterly terrified of them. It’s definitely a distraction.

Hermann is deliciously sweaty and covered in dust when he comes over, gloves and sledgehammer swapped out, and he grimaces when Newt kisses him in greeting.

“I’m utterly filthy,” he says, though doesn’t try and pull himself away.

“Don’t care,” Newt replies, which is true. “But we got an excuse for a break, if you want one.”

“I could rather do with a sit down.” Hermann’s back cracks alarmingly when he stretches it which, yeah. Neither of them are getting any younger. Newt still can’t believe they’re nearly _fifty_. How did that even happen?

They retreat to the office, which doesn’t have a couch (boo), but does have Hermann’s special uber-expensive old man chair, and also a nearby desk Newt can sit on and get hugged, which is a pretty great substitute, even with a stinky, dusty husband (especially then).

“I assume this is for me?” Hermann says, after a moment. He flicks at the envelope, head still buried against Newt’s chest.

“Yup. It’s from your dad.”

Hermann sighs, straightens up with a half-hearted groan. “Does it have to be?” Hermann and Lars didn’t manage to have a heartwarming father-son reconciliation arc while Newt was busy being crazy and evil, and if anything their relationship has gotten worse since Newt, uh. Stopped doing that. Which they are totally aware is their fault; to say Lars does not approve of his son’s marriage is both an understatement and, apparently, a pan-universal constant. At least this universe’s Lars never tried to get Newt shot, though they suspect it’s only a matter of time.

“We think it’s an invitation to one of his Totally-Not Christmas Things,” Newt says.

“Of course it is.” Hermann, in his most exhausted voice, as he slices the envelope neatly open with a ceramic box cutter (nerd).

For basically as long as Newt can remember, Lars Gottlieb has held an end-of-year (in Hermann’s words) piss-up for everyone he deems important enough to be invited. Which usually means the Security Council, whichever Shatterdome Marshals are currently kissing his ass, any government officials who want free booze, and any industry execs looking to flog shit to any of the former groups. Which:

“You’ve been to these, yes?”

“Yeah,” Newt admits. “Liwen made us go for a few years until she banned us.” They’d been put on notice the year they’d been caught eating out the (married) Turkish foreign minister in one of the private boxes at the Palais Garnier, then banned the next after getting into a fistfight with some emir or other in the ocean outside the Waldorf Astoria in Palm Jumeirah. Allegedly. They’d been too off their face on Dom and coke to remember the latter in particular but, well. There’d been video and their voice _is_ pretty distinctive.

Hermann sighs. “I’d honestly though Father had given up inviting me, given my record.”

“Never tempted?”

Hermann opens his mouth, closes it, then flushes. “Ah,” he says. “Once. I’d thought—” He stops himself, swallows. Then squares his jaw and looks Newt dead in the eyes as he says: “I’d heard you might be there.”

“Ah.” Awks. It’s not that they don’t talk about The Interregnum, as Hermann calls it, but . . . “Guessing this was the year after the Waldorf Incident.”

“I made some inquiries and it was . . . politely hinted you would not be in attendance. I suspect that information had exactly the opposite effect people were hoping when they gave it to me.”

Newt knocks their knees against Hermann’s good one. “Sorry, dude.” They would’ve been an asshole, they know that one for sure. Worse than an asshole, maybe, and _he_ would’ve flipped out and they would’ve ended up drinking way too much just to try and stop their brain from feeling like it was tearing itself apart, neuron by neuron.

Hermann doesn’t try and tell them anything dumb, like they’ve got nothing to apologize for or whatever the shit. Instead, he just takes their hand in his, and kisses their scarred-up knuckles, one-by-one.

Fuck they are one lucky sonuvabitch.

“How, ah. How would you feel,” Hermann asks, once he’s made a few passes. His voice is oddly hesitant, hands slightly clammy around Newt’s. “About . . . making your return?”

“To your dad’s thing?”

“Yes. Would you go again?”

Absolutely not under any circumstances. Well, any circumstances except one, maybe, so:

“Dunno, man. Hear Lars’s rogue middle son is a bit of a dreamboat. He gonna be there?”

“Mm, maybe.” The thinnest edge of a mischievous smirk. “Though perhaps not entirely available; I hear his husband can be quite possessive.”

“Pfft, please. He got his dumb supervillain plan foiled by _teenagers_. Plus have you even seen that guy? He’s, like. Three feet tall. We reckon we can take him.”

“Scandalous,” Hermann says, with such mock Victorian effrontery Newt just _has_ to kiss him. Just a little bit, saccharine-sweet and Hallmark-soft, totally gross and super in love.

“Probably moot, dude,” they admit, when they’re done. “No way your dad’s letting us anywhere near his fancy shindig _now_.”

“He did rather pointedly not invite you, yes,” Hermann says, and Newt Gets It.

“Which is why you want us to go?”

“It _is_ a little petty, I’ll admit.”

Newt laughs, because, uh. _Yeah_ it is. “Hermann, babe,” they say, with absolute sincerity. “Please know that we love you and, yes, we will absolutely gatecrash your father’s stupid culturally inappropriate rich person Christmas party, if it will make you happy.” A pause, then: “Assuming you can get us outta the country and off to . . . wherever.”

“Mm, well,” says Hermann, smiling his little smug asshole smile. “Leave that one to me.”

* * *

So, anyway. Tl;dr but that’s how they end up landing Alice on the tarmac of some Dstl base in Fuckoff Nowhere, England, at some ungodly hour of the morning, roughly three weeks later.

It never ceases to amaze Newt—in the awesome way they’re perennially amazed by their genius sexy badass husband—how casually Hermann manages to pull in impossible favors. It really shouldn’t, they know; Hermann has spent twenty years saving the world and twelve quietly collecting an entire ledger of, _We all owe you thanks, Doctor Gottlieb. If there’s anything we can ever do to repay you . . ._ in return. Newt knows they’re currently taking up more than their fair share of those cash ins but, on the other hand, this one in particular _is_ them doing Herms a favor in the first place. So they’ll call it even.

Hermann takes a deep breath, looking out through Alice’s dome at the welcoming committee. This was the trade-off for getting Newt permission to enter England; technically, they’re here on a status update to Whitehall, showing off the last year’s worth of K-Science’s achievements.

“I hate these things,” Hermann says, fidgeting with the head of his cane.

Newt kisses him on his freshly shaved cheek, fastening kaiju-bone cufflinks and grabbing the jacket from their most conservative charcoal suit from a chair. “Don’t worry babe,” they say. “Leave it to us; we’ve done thousands of these. Basically _born_ to do it. Just stand there and look like the sexy genius you are.”

This is true, more-or-less. _He’s_ been freaking out since the post-wake-up blow job wore off, but all that means is _he’s_ gone deep; down into the back of their mind where it’s quiet and safe. It’s been happening more and more this past year, as they’ve grown to trust themself. Not working at cross-purposes all the time is a real banger, A++ would recommend, and it means they can just shrug on their suit jacket and slick back their hair and just _be_ Doctor Newton Geiszler, just for a few hours, while they get through the product demo shit. A piece of cake, compared to the last decade, now they’re 2IC-ing for someone they actually respect, and can actually talk about the tech they’ve been making for a cause that won’t get them shot. Fucking splendid, as Herms would definitely think, if not necessarily say out loud.

The welcoming committee’s reaction as Alice drops Newt and Hermann down onto the ground is exactly as dramatically delicious as Newt had been hoping for. They’ve got the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the Defense Staff and the UK’s UN rep, plus maybe a dozen more aids and flunkies and hangers on. Everyone is very obviously terrified of standing so close to an actual live kaiju, but no one wants to be the one to wuss out and back down first. Newt just gives everyone their best deranged grin as they go through the introductions and the hand-shaking.

Strictly speaking, they came armed with a holopresentation with things like the biopolymer work and the zero-point energy gates, but it’s pretty obvious that what everyone is immediately interested in is Alice. She’s not scared of humans—why would she be?—so has just hunkered down on the tarmac, as close as she’s allowed, to watch them.

“You can touch her,” Newt tells the Prime Minister, Sarah Bell. They’ve met before, at some Shao thing a few years back, and Newt kind of likes her. She’s about their age and trained as a civil engineer, before she got into politics via union-organized action against the Wall. She’d also shut Newt down hard when they’d tried hitting on her, meaning she has good taste in men to boot.

“Is she— is she dangerous?” Bell’s eyes keep flicking between Alice and Newt, as if she’s not sure which one of them poses more of a threat. But she takes an almost unconscious half-step closer to the former, hand half-raised.

Newt shrugs. “She likes humans,” they say, because it’s true. She’s intensely curious—which Newt kinda already knew and which Kaijute more recently confirmed—and, with the Flesh’s crap mostly scraped out of her brain, has no innate tendency to aggression.

“She’d defend us and Herms if she thought we were in danger,” Newt adds, because Bell still looks dubious. “But she’s not gonna, like. Chomp down on you or anything. She’s socialized enough to see humans as part of the hive. Friends.” More of Kaijute’s work; he’s written several papers on it, and he’s been back into their universe a few times to check findings. By his telling of it, stripped of Precursor influence, the kaiju are highly social, have theory of mind, and can identify humans as individual sentient entities and think of them as colony mates. They also like life on Earth a lot more than the Anteverse, mostly on account of not having to spend their entire existences in little cages while having their minds annihilated by the Flesh’s kill drive with, honestly, Huge Mood.

Newt gets more emotional than they were really expecting when Bell takes the final few steps forward, and puts her hand on Alice’s jaw.

“Oh,” she says. “She’s very warm. I’ve never—” _Touched a kaiju before,_ she doesn’t need to add, because so few people have.

Alice rumbles, and Bell startles at the sound so Newt says, “It’s okay. She’s just saying hi.” Their watch is pinging with an endless stream of Alice’s “👋👋👋💙🙋🏾♀️💙👋,” so he figures that’s a close enough translation.

“Does she— How much does she . . . understand?”

Newt shrugs. “Enough,” they say. “We Drifted for ten years. Their brains don’t work like a human’s but the influence went both ways.” Alice understands human language and human social structure better than any other kaiju except Kaijute, who had a head start and doesn’t count.

“She’s . . . she’s truly incredible. I’d heard the PPDC was working on— on domestication, of course, but I never expected results so soon.”

Newt winces inwardly at _domestication_ , but decides to let it go. Baby steps. Instead they say: “There’s only one species out there with more beef against the Precursors than humanity, and that’s the kaiju.”

“They’ll fight for us?”

“They’ll fight _with_ you.” _They just want a chance,_ Newt does not say. _To exist. To have the thoughts inside their heads be their own, to make their own choices and live their own lives. They don’t look like you or think like you but they’re only your enemies if that’s what you make them._

Definitely too much. So Newt keeps their mouth shut. Except Prime Minister Bell just looks at them, hand still tracing the scutes on Alice’s chin, and Newt thinks she hears it all the same.

* * *

Hermann, meanwhile, spends most of the morning talking weapons engineering with the military types. He nerds out enough to forget he’s supposed to be nervous and, honestly, he’s done this sort of crap almost as often as Newt has. So it’s fine.

The Chief of the Defense Staff wants a tour inside Alice, so it’s a good thing Newt made the bed and tidied up Hermann’s clothes pile. There’s lots of _ooh-_ ing and _aah_ -ing and comparisons to private jets, then Newt gets Alice on the speaker and their guests nearly shit themselves.

“It _talks_?” from the Minister, Daniel Adams. He’s been spending all morning causing Hermann such grief by asking such inane questions that Alice had started texting, asking if she should eat him (Newt, reluctantly, said no).

“HELLO YES TALK,” says Alice. Her voice is synthetic and intentionally artificial-sounding; kaiju don’t speak so much as blast each other with image-memory-emotions in the hive mind, and they’ve tried to keep Alice’s comms systems as “natural” to her as they can. The result can be kind of like standing inside a living Tumblr dashboard but, well. Newt’s kind of into the whole disjointed, Dada-esque shitpost aesthetic of it all.

“We’ve known they’ve been capable of complex communication for over a decade,” Hermann is saying.

“Well, yes, but—”

“We haven’t had the technology to allow them to speak with _us_ , but the same cybernetic interfaces that allow Alice control over her robotic systems are perfectly well-suited to facilitating human-to-kaiju communication. Newton and Doctor Geiszler have been working on refining the technology.”

“I find it hard to imagine they have anything much to say,” Adams mutters, eying Alice’s brain tank in a way Newt does not like.

“Alice, baby,” they say. “Did you take some pictures on your way over here?”

Instead of a verbal response, the holodisplays are immediately filled with photos and videos. Everything Alice saw on her trip and wanted a record of.

“Which are your favorites?” Newt adds. “What are we putting up on Insta later?”

“It— it has _Instagram_?” from the Chief of the Defense Staff.

“Sure does; alice-dot-PPDC.” Her bio describes her as a “cybernetics research program” which, as far as Newt can tell, most people have taken to mean some kind of autonomous drone. “She has like fifty thousand followers.”

“Dear god.”

Alice, meanwhile, has whittled her collection down to six images: one of the night sky; one of city lights, far below; a sunset and a sunrise; a storm in the distance; a short video panning over the clouds.

“Looking good, baby,” Newt says. They vet Alice’s photos before upload, of course. She has a habit of taking pictures of _everything_ she finds novel or stimulating, which means anything from embarrassingly candid shots of PPDC personnel to videos of classified research projects, and she doesn’t always have the context to know what’s appropriate to show to people and what’s . . . not so much. “What are your current top Instas?”

Alice brings them up; more sunsets and space photos, plus various wildlife she’s seen. She’s getting pretty good at predicting what people will enjoy seeing; her uploads going from haphazard and random and out-of-focus to artsy hipster stuff that would give actual pros a run for their money. Hermann keeps upgrading her cameras, too, and Kaijute’s threatened to teach her how to use Lightroom the next time he’s in for a visit (after having learned how to use it himself, first).

“The . . . the _kaiju_ took these?” from the UN rep, James Clarke.

“She’s rather good, don’t you think?” Hermann, the smugly proud parent.

Bell and the Chief of the Defense Staff have their own phones out, and Newt would put money on Alice just having gained two new followers.

“It’s incredible,” Bell says. “I’d never have thought them capable of— of art.”

“Well. I wouldn’t go that—” is as far as Adams gets.

“Other Newt still plays music,” Newt points out, because the Minister is a dipass and also empirically wrong. “His primary brain has more in common with a human’s so it’s not too surprising, but his secondary brain is pure kaiju and it’s pretty active when he’s jamming, especially if he’s using both sets of hands. Plus their version of Raijin, Otouto, likes metal and hates vaporwave, and he and his sisters all love watching anime. It’s not that surprising; animals having aesthetic preferences was described by Darwin, and we know the daikaiju have at least some form of sexual selection based on audio and visual cues.” Or Kaijute has extrapolated as much, based on a story his own brain-in-a-jar, Aurora, once told him.

Their little tour group looks startled at this information, which Newt supposes might have to do with the casual reminder that, yes, they are in contact with their alternate universe doppelgänger, and, yes, he is a kaiju, and, yes, his universe does have not one but _three_ daikaiju, peacefully chilling in its Pacific. None of this information is secret; they’ve held public press conferences about it, with both Newt and Kaijute in attendance, and there’s a formal cooperation agreement between the two PPDCs. But Newt supposes it is kind of wild, and it’s easier for people to just . . . conveniently not remember that it’s a thing, not have to grapple with the implications that there might be other versions of _them_ out there, somewhere, too.

(It’s kind of comforting, Newt supposes, to know they’re pretty much to worst version of themself they’re likely to find. Short of any universe where Hermann and the Baby Rangers hadn’t managed to stop them, in Tokyo, which. Well. There’s not likely to be much _to_ find, in those cases. So, yeah. Newt totally gets the whole easier-not-to-think-about-it thing.)

Since everyone is already present, and a holoprojector is a holoprojector, they give their general status update right there in Alice’s cockpit. Bell is pretty interested in the construction materials stuff and the military people like the weapons dev, and by the time Newt and Hermann are getting piled into the back of a V-Class, some hours later, everyone seems satisfied that the money the British government is funneling into the PPDC is not, in fact, going to waste.

“I think that went rather well,” Hermann hazards, once they’ve left the base behind. It’s about a two-hour drive to London, and they can’t take Alice because, well. London. So car it is.

“Yeah.” Newt closes their eyes, rolls their shoulders and feels the weird tingle they always get when _he_ comes back up for air. “They liked your biomat stuff. Makes’ll be happy.” The UK have always been a pain re. funding, on account of the whole not-being-on-the-Pacific thing (and the whole Lars’s-friends-in-government thing), and tend to lead the charge on cutting the PPDC’s budget and pushing privatization whenever so much of a whiff of the option to comes around. But neither Hermann nor, now, Newt will work private sector and everything exciting (and profitable) K-Science is doing hinges both on them, personally, as well as an entire library of international agreements restricting the export of Anteverse-related technologies. In other words, if Whitehall wants access to any of Hermann’s new guns or fancy ceramics or self-healing k-glass, then they’re going to have to go through Mako to get them. And it’s not going to be free.

“I rather think they were more interested in Alice.” Hermann turns his hand palm-up on the armrests, and Newt threads their fingers through his.

“Everyone’s _interested_ in Alice,” they say. “But she’s not all that useful, commercially speaking. Plus, any government giving us money to make kaiju is committing electoral suicide.” Technically, K-Tech doesn’t even have its own budget; they’re funded as footnotes in more traditional, Jaeger-focused projects owned either by J-Tech or K-Science. Even Vi and Suresh technically report to Hermann.

“Well,” the man himself says, “regardless. We got through it. _You_ got us through it; I was a babbling mess.”

“You were a sexy genius, dude.” Not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they’ve always had a thing for the way Hermann gets when he’s on a tear; wild-eyed and gesticulating, as sharp as a Jaeger’s blade, as world-changing as the Breach. It’s _hot_. They’d blow him right now if he’d let them (he won’t; they already asked).

“You’re not so unappealing yourself, Doctor Geiszler.”

When they roll their head to the side, Hermann is looking at them with the dumbest, softest, sappiest expression. It makes their heart skip and their gut clench, and they know they’re looking equally dopey in return.

“And thank you,” Hermann says, utterly sincerely. “I know these things can be . . . hard on you.” Fuck but they don’t deserve him. They tried to _strangle_ him for freak’s sake, and now he’s thanking them for putting on a big boy suit and wrangling assholes for a few hours.

“Nah,” they say, lifting Hermann’s hand up to kiss his long, sexy fingers. “We’re cool. You’re the one who has to put up with our weird brain shit.” They know they’re . . . different, when they’re Like That and they know Hermann can tell. Just few steps to the left of the man he fell in love with, total uncanny valley. They don’t know how Hermann puts up with it—they’re not sure they’d be able to, if things were reversed—but Herms has never asked them to be anything other than what they are, at least from the moment he figured out what that was, and he loves his “Newton” and his Newt just the same.

* * *

The car ride is mostly pretty chill. Hermann hasn’t been back to England for a while and points out some of the things he remembers and some of the things he doesn’t. Newt’s been here more recently and tells a few gossipy stories they think Hermann might find amusing. They both doze a bit, and complain about the London traffic when they hit it, and Newt texts Alice to assure her they’re okay.

(They’ve left her back at the Dstl base. There is, they know, a small chance people might try and tamper with her somehow, but that’s what the stuff with the Instagram was about. Letting everyone know Alice can not just take photos of anything anyone might think of trying to do to her, but also immediately send them to her Dads. Plus the whole thing where she’s literally a house-sized kaiju and immune to most conventional weapons, and just because she normally _doesn’t_ go around smashing up the landscape, doesn’t mean she _can’t_.)

The car pulls up outside the Mandarin Oriental a little after midday. Hermann has been here before for events but never stayed, and keeps blinking at everything, wide-eyed and muttering variations on, “Well this is a bit posh, isn’t it?” while they both sit in the foyer and wait for check-in. Newt, meanwhile, is a serial destroyer of the M.O.’s suites and and gets a, “Welcome back, Doctor Geiszler,” from a clerk doing a bang-up job of hiding her sheer terror behind a mild and professional smile. They put on their most inoffensive persona in turn, listening to the girl’s little intro spiel and watching boys in weird, old-timey uniforms whisk away their luggage.

When all the Ts and Cs are signed and the credit cards are handed over, they get lead to the elevators with a, “Doctors, follow me, please.”

Newt did all the hotel bookings so they know Hermann has no idea where they’re actually headed. Hermann, who’d scoffed at the idea they should stay here, just because it’s the venue Lars had booked out for his little party. _“It’s over a thousand pounds a night, Newton! Don’t be ridiculous,”_ being indicative of the argument, as if they have anything to spend money on nowadays other than spoiling Hermann in the dopiest ways possible. So that’s what they’re gonna do, and if Herms truly hates it? Well, then next time they can stay at whatever mid-priced chain motel makes him happy. Hell, Newt would fall asleep on a bench in a Tube station if they had to, so long as Herms was there, too.

“Doctors. Ninon and Chloe will be looking after your treatment this afternoon. I hope you enjoy.”

Newt grins, stretching and rolling their shoulders. “Oh hells yeah, we intend to.”

“Newton?” Herms has apparently come back to himself, peering around suspiciously at the fact they’re very obviously in the hotel spa, not their rooms.

“Figured we had some time to kill before your dad’s thing,” Newt says, linking arms with Hermann. “So we’re gonna get rich person pampered for a few hours.”

“I really— ah—” Hermann blinks, looks at the eager-faced young ladies who’re waiting to usher them inside. “Well. Erm . . .”

Newt pats him on the chest, gently nudging him forward. “C’mon, dude. Get you all pre-relaxed before you have to make nice with Lars all night.”

“I suppose you think you’re rather clever, planning all this out in advance.” But he steps forward at Newt’s urging. Hermann is both a massive backrub slut and totally invested in pretending he isn’t. There’s no way he’s going to say no to an overpriced hotel massage, which of course Newt had known from the outset.

“You know us. Always another evil scheme.”

“And yet, somehow, I keep letting you get away with them,” says Hermann, lips pressed together to suppress his grin.

* * *

They stumble into the penthouse some three hours later, loose-limbed and glow-skinned from a dizzyingly complicated array of oils and overpriced muds and hot stones and herbal teas and a rainfall shower and an afternoon tea of champagne and fussy petits fours. Hermann takes one look around the sitting room, sighs, and says, “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

Newt just kisses him on his lusciously exfoliated cheek and starts shucking down to their underpants, eventually dumping themself face-first onto the bed with a satisfied (and slightly tipsy) moan.

Hermann potters around himself, exploring the rooms of the penthouse, ending up in the walk-in with a disgusted: “They hung up all our things!”

Newt laughs into the duvet cover, squirming onto their side in time to see their outraged husband storm in in his shirt and socks.

“This room is bigger than a _house_ ,” Hermann announces. “It is absolutely too much. What on Earth is it costing?”

“It’s one night, dude,” Newt says. The answer is somewhere in the ballpark of ten thousand pounds, but Hermann can go look it up on the credit card statement if he really wants to.

“You’ve stayed here before.” Not exactly a question, and Newt just huffs in response.

“Yeah,” they say. “Much better this time, though. With you here.”

“Charmer.” But Hermann is trying to hide the edge of a smirk beneath his pout, and he drops his shirt to the floor and comes to sprawl out on the bed readily enough. “Lord, this is comfortable.”

Newt just chuckles, wriggling closer, insinuating themself under Hermann’s arm.

They cuddle, there on the ridiculous silk brocade duvet cover on the ridiculous king-sized bed, nuzzling and kissing lazily. Hermann smells like cedar and bergamot and Newt is super into it, running hands down lean, smooth flanks, rolling them over to feel the weight and the warmth of Hermann’s body, pressing into their own.

They stroke each other off; the sort of lazy, unspectacular sex they do because it feels good and because they can. Hermann comes gasping against the scutes on Newt’s chest, fingers tracing both the raised pathways and the ink that swirls beneath and around the edges. When Newt comes in turn, it’s laughing into Hermann’s neck, pure joy bubbling up and pushing outward. It’s boring and perfect and Newt never wants it to end except for how they’re now sticky, and that’s terrible.

So they clean up with Newt’s underwear and end up sitting on the huge round day bed on the balcony, watching the night creep in over Hyde Park. It’s stupid cold so they wrap themselves in fluffy blankets and decadent bathrobes, eating ridiculous gourmet snacks from the minibar because it’s still hours until dinner and they never did get a proper lunch.

“Hey, Herms?” Newt says, around a mouthful of truffle chips.

“Mm?”

“Love you.” Completely sincerely, and it earns them a brilliant smile in response; soft and easy and secret, from the Hermann no one else ever gets to see. Not even the phone; by the time Newt’s snapped a selfie, Standard Edition Pissy Hermann is back, but Newt sends the results to the group chat anyway. It earns them one of every single emoji heart from Alice—who’s only recently learned how to use the reaction function and is very excited about the discovery—and a barfing face and a _stop being gross guys_ from Tendo. Newt supposes that about sums it up.

* * *

“I feel ridiculously overdressed. Are you sure this is appropriate?” Hermann, stepping out of the walk-in and nearly stopping Newt’s heart for his efforts.

Three weeks ago, Hermann had not owned a single tuxedo ( _“No Herms it’s not ‘just a suit,’ don’t ask us the differences we already sound like an asshole; just trust us.”_ ), which had necessitated a rush trip to Newt’s tailor. Peter has, of course, done an absolutely bang-up job, hence Newt’s current cardiological predicament. Because of course they know their husband is secretly criminally hot, but Hermann’s standard dress sense is also “blind octogenarian professor from the 1950s,” meaning a lot of other people aren’t in on the secret.

They will be after tonight, after seeing Herms in his charcoal tux, cut properly for once, black silk accents and crisp white shirt and big, wide, silver silk tie. He looks amazing, even if his Windsor knot skills leave a lot to be desired.

“You look incredible, babe.” Newt says the first bit out loud, and two strides later they’re working on the second. Which turns out to be harder than it looks, backwards. They’re not used to doing this one someone else.

“ _You_ look like a New York mafioso.”

Newt snorts. They’re wearing their second most assholish tux, black on black on black, with the electric blue pocket square and the kaiju maw brocade lining and—

“Good Lord, does your pinstripe just say ‘NEWT’ over and over again?”

“Sure does!” Wearing a pinstripe tuxedo with a black silk shirt wouldn’t even make top five on the asshole list. The fact that said stripes are, indeed, made up of Newt’s name repeated over and over in grey stitching is what really lets this particular look shine.

(Personally, Newt’s always thought they look kind of stupid in all black—their general day suits nowadays are in grays and blues—but it’s one of those things that’s the principle rather than the vanity. Which in this particular instance is “piss off Lars enough he focuses on us and leaves Hermann the hell alone.” The only reason they’re not wearing their _most_ assholish tuxedo—the one with the black-blue-and-silver metallic silk kaiju brocade jacket—is because they’re holding it for the next time they have to do boring diplomat balls with Kaijute. The fabric came from his universe, after all—apparently his metamour runs a kaiju-inspired fashion label, which, _so_ sick—so he really should be around for its debut.)

“There.” Tie re-tied, knot big and fat and square, and Newt spends way longer than they really need to smoothing Hermann’s collar and his shoulders and, well. He just looks _so good_ —and feels so good, beneath the wool—so they kiss him with a: “Seriously, dude. It’s black tie, you’re in a tux, and you look fucking amazing.” He’s even done his hair properly, in the way he almost never bothers, which makes him look like the sexy lovechild of James Bond and Alan Turing. “We’re gonna have to beat people off you with a stick.”

“I suspect they’ll find you intimidating enough as it is.” Hermann’s smirking, though. Newt has long since worked out the whole mostly-but-not-entirely-domesticated-supervillain thing really _does it_ for Herms, in a way he’ll never admit out loud. So Newt can be a teensy tiny bit feral—like wearing his Asshole Tux to Lars’s rich people do—and everyone will still be having fun. Perfect.

Newt takes another photo of the both of them, and sends it to the chat with the caption _about to go smash the larsbeast, wish us luck!_ Then: “You ready for this, dude?”

“We’re already late.”

“ _Fashionably_ late.” It’s 7:16, so not even really late at all, but Newt decides not to mention it. “C’mon.” They hold out their arm, inviting. “We show up, smash some champagne, scare some normies, and bail whenever you‘ve had enough, okay?” Hermann is generally stoic about the whole living-in-constant-pain thing, and he’s never let it get in the way of little things like, for example, saving the entire world twice over. But using it as an excuse to escape social functions? Oh yeah he totally will. Every time. And it’s not even, like. A fake excuse; the standing around making small talk is as physically taxing for him as it is mentally, and both together tend to make him snappish.

Hermann sighs, almost certainly thinking the same thing. But he does link his free arm with Newt’s. “I did rather drag you all the way out here,” he says. “I suppose it would be a bit rich for me to back out now.”

“Don’t worry about us, dude,” Newt says, as they make their way to the penthouse door. “We get a sweet weekend away treating our honey to a fancy-ass stay in a fancy-ass hotel, just like he deserves. We’re having a great time.”

“It would be nice,” Hermann says, wistful. “To do this more often. I don’t think I’ve had a proper holiday in . . . Lord. Ever.”

To be completely honest, Newt isn’t sure whether they even get vacation time. They’re still technically classified as a prisoner of war, but there’s robust debate about what that means, exactly, when it comes to how punitive the “prisoner” part of that title needs to be. Particularly since they have kinda defected (or de-defected . . . re-fected, as it were). Still: “Well, there’s this sweet-ass resort in Vietnam we always liked, if you just wanna chill out with an umbrella drink by the beach.”

“Some obscenely priced luxury destination, no doubt.”

Which, okay. It is, but: “Herms, dude. Literally every person alive on the planet right now owes you their life. _Twice_. At least. You’ve probably earned a few weeks kicking back in whatever frou-frou den of decadence you want, y’know?”

Hermann sighs as they step into the elevators. “With my luck the day I take a holiday is the day the Anteverse decides to pop back around for a catch-up.”

Newt bumps their hips together, grinning. “Nah. We’ll send them a strongly worded letter if they try.”

“If only you could,” he says, wistful, as Newt thinks, _Not yet, but . . . maybe . . ._

* * *

Lars’s shindig is in ballroom, which is a huge space full of chandeliers and French doors and, right now, people milling around in tuxes and ball gowns. Hermann’s palm gets sweatier the closer they get, and _he’s_ not faring much better. Easier to deal with, though; just roll _him_ up real small back down in that corner of their brain, where they keep everything soft and nice and human. Tonight they’re here for Hermann, and they tack that to the metal pinboard as the world gets sharp and bright and simple, more removed. Something they’re happening to, not the reverse.

Hermann will be fine. Newt knows this because they know the one thing Herms never quite managed to get through his adorable, stubborn, genius brain, which is that he’s a rockstar. A hero, a living legend. A whole roomful of the rich and powerful and every single one of them—every. Single. One—will be clamoring for Hermann’s attention, for his approval, not the reverse. Newt might be the one with a religion (which: still so weird) but Hermann’s the living saint. The man to whom the whole world owes a debt, and the man who’s only ever collected on even a fraction of it by asking to live quietly in a musty bunker doing dumb science with his insane husband. Hermann has no freakin’ clue just how amazing that makes him. How valuable.

Newt knows. And Newt will make _very_ certain that everyone else here knows they know. Just in case.

Newt snags them some champagne the second they get through the ballroom doors, and clinks their glasses. “Ready to slum it with the elite?”

Hermann doesn’t even get a chance to answer before: “Hermann? Hermann Gottlieb, my word man. You never come to these things.” And a towering man with a Cat-V mustache is barreling down on them.

“Ah, Lord— Lord Pelton,” Hermann stammers. “A pleasure. I—”

“The pleasure is all mine, I assure you.” Pelton doesn’t so much as shake Hermann’s hand as try and engulf him in a full-body earthquake. “How have you been, old chap?”

“I, uh. Well, yes. Uh. Married”—Newt can practically hear the _help me!_ screaming down the long-dead ghost-Drift—“Married, actually. Uh, yes. My husband, Doctor Newton Geiszler. Newton, Lord James Pelton, Chancellor—”

“Of Cambridge University,” Newt finishes because, yeah. They know the guy. “Hey dude. Good to see you again.”

Pelton barely even freezes at the sight of Newt, and shakes their outstretched hand with only the slightest haste. “Doctor Geiszler. It’s been a few years. How are you finding married life? And back at the PPDC, too I hear.”

Nobody is going to mention The Thing, at least not this early into the champagne. Newt would put money on it. “Never should have left,” they say, completely sincerely. “Still don’t know how we managed to convince Herms to make an honest man of us, but it’s the greatest thing we’ve ever done.” They give Hermann their sappiest, most earnestly lovesick look, mostly just to see the way the tips of his ears go adorably pink. They’re kinda not suspecting the kiss on the cheek but, well. They’re not going to say no!

“Good man, good man.” Obligatory pleasantries over, Pelton turns back to Hermann. “Come on, let me introduce you. Everyone will be tremendously excited you’re here.”

Pelton doesn’t quite manhandle Hermann—most people don’t have the balls to try, and he’s no exception—but does do his best to physically usher him around regardless. Newt trails a half-step behind, one hand holding their shitty non-vintage Moët, the other plastered to the small of Hermann’s back.

Things go down pretty much how they expect. _Everyone_ wants to be Herms’s new BFF, and he gets passed around like a puppy at a primary school, spluttering the entire time. Newt gets the obligatory awkward, over-polite handshakes and makes sure to make _extra_ eye-contact with a few key players, just so everyone’s on the same page about exactly what sort of jolly good time Hermann is here to have.

Herms starts to loosen up about halfway through his second glass of champagne, and ends up holding court to a cluster of Lords and CEOs and other assorted assholes, over-explaining temporal-shift Breach physics with a “it’s quite simple really” that proves not to be entirely correct, given the average cranial capacity of his audience. Newt keeps handing him hors d'oeuvres whenever they come around, nodding and saying “mm hmm” and “exactly” a lot until they’re pulled into a side conversation with Mindy Lu, a.k.a. the wife of Shao’s European regional VP.

Newt likes Mindy, who always looks awkward and uncomfortable in her impeccable tux, and hates these things almost as much as Hermann does. Mindy is into anime and comic books, and runs a reasonably successful Let’s Play channel popular with the forty-plus mom crowd looking for some way to vicariously relive their _World of Warcraft_ raiding days in between school drop-offs and work commutes. Getting drunk at the back of ballrooms, arguing with her over the life choices of Sylvanas Windrunner were some of the few times Newt managed to almost feel human, back in the Interregnum.

Newt is not currently either feeling nor interested in feeling particularly human—they let that one go somewhere in the harsh, bright, ever-lit fluorescents of a Shatterdome cell—but is tremendously interested in arguing with Mindy over the _Outer Void_ season finale and whether _Supernatural_ really needs another reboot (amazing, how much TV they’ve managed to catch up on, now their free time isn’t dedicated to trying to secretly destroy all life on Earth). So that’s cool. Mindy talks about her dilemma over whether to do sponsored plays on her channel and asks lots of questions about Kaijute, which Newt happily answers. She shows them pictures of her kid (adorable), and asks if Newt’s considered any of their own. (Which, yes. Absolutely yes; it would be _so_ trivial. Newt could do it in a heartbeat, but: “Hermann’s not into it,” they say. “And it’s not something we could, like. Do alone, y’know?”)

And then, somewhere in a lull about the boss designs in the latest _Final Fantasy_ , Mindy says:

“I think it’ll be good. For Jaz. To see you. You look good. Really good. Really . . . happy.”

Jasmine Lu is currently halfway across the room, next to the ridiculously over-decorated Christmas tree, talking to the CEO of BAE and his wife. Jasmine and Newt do _not_ get along, mostly because Newt always found her far too difficult to fool or bribe and so spent a great deal of effort trying to undermine her career, instead. Which: oops.

“We are,” Newt says, because it’s true. “We’re really . . . Like. It was all A Lot, y’know? The circumstances weren’t, uh . . . weren’t great. But we’re glad we got out. And we don’t miss a single thing about it.” _Massive_ understatement. Hermann is a warm, slightly drunk, slightly too loud presence at their side. In retrospect, nothing that they did, nothing that they learnt, came even close to making up for the fact they almost lost him.

Mindy nods, wide-eyed and earnest. “Jaz’s, uh. Handcuffs unlock in April,” she says. “After . . . everything, we’ve been talking about maybe, um. New opportunities.” Handcuffs of the golden variety; financial incentives to keep her at Shao. Newt had drafted them, in fact, effectively sending Lu into exile in Europe to keep her out of his business in the Pacific.

“There’s been a lot of that, going ‘round,” Newt says.

“Jaz keeps talking about going back to school. Doing, like. A history degree or something like that. I told her she should. We have plenty of money. She wouldn’t have to work, and she could spend more time with Mika.”

“She not going for it?”

“I think she wants to, but . . . Liwen keeps calling her, trying to get her to stay on. There’s been a lot of, uh. Um. Well, you know.” Restructuring. Backfilling Liwen and Newt and everyone the CCP shoulder-tapped to take the fall for their shit. “The COO position has opened up; Liwen’s recommended Jaz for it to the Board. It’s, um. It’s a _lot_ of money.”

“But it’s back in Shanghai,” Newt guesses, and Mindy nods.

“It’s a nice city!” she says, a little too defensively. “But it’s a long way. And our families are here. _And_ I don’t speak Mandarin. And, like . . . it’ll be stressful, right? Long hours, weekends. So sue me if I want to spend at least a little time with my wife while we’re still young! Ish.” Then, after a nervous laugh: “And . . . I just . . .” She bites her lip, and Newt can see her trying to calculate how much she should say of what she really wants to. Mindy is a little naive and a lot awkward, but she’s not stupid; she knows Newt might be fun, but they aren’t safe.

Even still . . .

“Mika starts school this year,” she eventually says. “And I just . . . It gets to a point where you have to kind of . . . Think. Because one day, Mika’s going to come home and ask why Mummy makes guns and bombs to hurt people and I just . . . I don’t know what I’m going to say to that. There are so many little lies we tell ourselves, about how it’s okay, it’s to protect the planet, if we didn’t do it someone else would so not being there isn’t going to make a difference, but . . .” She sighs, glances awkwardly at Newt again. “Sorry for saying it but, uh. Tokyo sort of . . . made it hard to keep making excuses. About what sort of legacy you’re leaving behind.”

“Amen to that.” Newt raises their glass in recognition because, well. If there’s one thing they know about, it’s legacies.

Mindy gives them a thin-lipped, rueful smile. “Sorry,” she says. “You probably don’t care about all this . . .” She trails off but Newt just shrugs, open-palmed.

“Believe it or not,” they say, “we get it a lot. Apparently you spend ten years undermining a company, and suddenly every disaffected employee wants to come ask you for career advice.” This is true; they’re batting about an email a week on the subject, and it’s been getting more and more over time as word spreads. Everyone from executives they’ve personally fist-fought to janitors and front-desk clerks who’ve probably never even seen them firsthand. “You can probably guess what we say.”

“You think people should get out.”

Newt makes another shrugging gesture with their champagne flute. “Look,” they say, “Jaz is a smart lady, and good-hearted. She never put up with our bullshit and it’s why we exiled her to the European office—”

“Oh. She did suspect—”

“And, like. Honestly, dude? She deserves better than all that shit. Deserves a job where she doesn’t have to keep lying to herself about what she’s doing or who she’s doing it for.”

Mindy chews her lip again, considering her next words. When they come, she says: “After . . . after everything, Jaz was pretty— um. She wasn’t doing . . . great. She kept telling me, ‘I knew he wasn’t right, I should’ve said something’ and— Sorry. Sorry, I shouldn’t— It’s just—”

“She didn’t know,” Newt says. “She didn’t like us, but she didn’t _know_. It was too big and too crazy. That’s how we got away with it. Tell her that for us, yeah? Nothing is her fault. We’d tell her ourself if we thought she’d, like. Deign to have us in her presence.”

Mindy nods. “Thank you. I will. I just—” She cuts herself off, then steels herself and: “Even if people couldn’t have guessed. What you were doing. It should _never_ have gone that far. So many people had to stand aside and look away and second guess their own hearts and— and that’s what that job _does_ , doesn’t it? People know it’s wrong—know they’re getting rich off death and suffering—but they tell themselves so many lies to justify it. The whole culture is sick and—” Her mouth clicks shut, expression falling into an unhappy pout. Newt would eat swarm shit if she hadn’t had the argument with her wife, many times over. “Jaz tells me I’m irrational,” she says, so... hah. “She says they’re making weapons to protect Earth. We have to do that, right? The Anteverse is still out there? _Someone_ needs to make the Jaeger, just in case.”

And, before Newt can figure out what to say to that:

“With all due respect, and excuse me for eavesdropping, but that’s simply not the case.” Hermann. He’s turned towards them, expression placid, but there’s pink in his cheeks and his glass in mostly empty, and what he says is: “The Jaeger were a desperate weapon for a desperate war, and always less than the sum of their parts. Dangerous and inefficient; they killed as many pilots as the kaiju did, and the only reason the losses were acceptable was we did not have time to develop something new. Then, when we got time, we squandered it developing shinier paint jobs when we should have reengineered the entire approach from the ground up; should have tried to predict what the Anteverse would throw at us _next_ , rather than assuming more of the same. The PPDC spent trillions building a state-of-the-art Jaeger fleet and Newton destroyed it in seconds simply by deploying something we’d never seen and never accounted for. I blame myself for that—”

“Herms—”

“Be quiet, Newton. The point is not self-flagellation. The point is to _learn_ from past mistakes. Liwen was right, in a way; she knew the Jaeger program had to change. Her mistake was thinking that meant a different _kind_ of Jaeger. But the Jaeger were designed to fight kaiju on Earth and I am no longer interested in waging this war on the Precursors’ terms. To change the battlefield we will need new weapons and innovative strategies; likely things no one has yet conceived of. And, you’ll have to excuse me for saying so, but nothing of use to us will be mass-produced in the factories of some multinational company more interested in shareholder dividends than the preservation of all life on this planet. The sooner everyone stops lying to themselves about this fact, the better off we will all be.” And then he sniffs, and pulls himself up as straight as he can go, and says: “Where is the gentleman with the champagne? I fear I may need another glass.”

Everyone is looking at him. _Everyone_. Stuffy, awkward Hermann Gottlieb, stuttering and crooked, suddenly transformed. And yeah, this isn’t new for Newt—it still makes them incredibly horny every time but it isn’t _new_ —but they know this is the first time pretty much anyone else will ever have had a chance to see Kickass War Hero Doctor Gottlieb. And Newt can _see_ the moment the scales fall from their eyes; the moment they have to come face-to-face with the fact they’d been assuming this fussy old nerd somehow _lucked_ into winning two wars, rather than dragged himself there through his genius brain and stubborn ass and sheer force of overwhelming awesomeness.

Hermann, who of course is still Hermann, immediately crumples in on himself the second he realizes everyone is looking. “Ah,” he murmurs. “Was that too much?”

Newt just smiles, and leans in, hand dipping maybe slightly _too_ low on Hermann’s back. “No, babe,” they say. “That was perfect.”

* * *

And then, of course, Lars.

“I need a word with my son, please.”

He appears out of nowhere, like Trespasser with a mustache, tall and lean and ramrod straight, despite his age, like he’s somehow keeping his octogenarian spine upright through sheer force of assholishness towards his son. _If I can do it, why can’t you?_

Newt has not seen Lars in several years and, given the circumstances, was perfectly prepared to reevaluate their prior opinion of the man. Well, the results of that have now come in, and the verdict is: FUCK THIS GUY. Still.

“Hello, Father,” Hermann says, as their little circle scatters like fish from a shark. “You’re looking well.”

Lars’s eyes flick to him, just once, then back to Newt. He _stares_ , steely and implacable, but this is something Hermann’s talked about before, so Newt is prepared for it and, also, they biologically don’t need to blink like a human does. So there’s that.

(They wouldn’t say “winning a stare-down with Lars Gottlieb” was the _primary_ reason they fixed the meat’s eyes in the first place . . . but it wasn’t _not_ a reason, either. Dude is an asshole. An opinion they’d managed to hang on to, every when everything else had been falling apart.)

Finally, Lars says: “This is a family affair, Doctor Geiszler. I’m sure you understand.”

“Newton is my husband,” Hermann snaps, before Newt can answer. “Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of him.”

Lars gets this expression like his nose is a black hole and it’s trying to suck all the rest of his facial features in, and so Newt—who long ago learnt the trolling value of being the bigger person—murmurs: “Plenty of other people here for us to bug, if you want to let your dad do his thing. Up to you.” They say it in Cantonese, because they know Hermann knows it, and Lars does not.

Hermann gives them the thin-lipped look he does when he knows _exactly_ what they’re doing . . . but it’s fond, too, and when he answers it’s to say: “Yes. Yes, alright. Thank you, darling.” Then kisses Newt right on the lips. In public. In front of his dad. Not with tongue (boo), but definitely pulling Newt close with his champagne hand so, like. Unmistakably possessive and intimate.

“Come find us when you’re done,” Newt says. Then, to Lars, “Later, dude.” Mostly because they know it’ll make the guy totally apoplectic.

They give Herms’s cute little ass one last squeeze, then go off to mingle. The first person to catch their eye and not immediately freeze like a cadet with a kaiju is the German Minister for Education and Research, Jan Klöckner, so Newt wanders over and they have a nice little chat.

Klöckner loves Newt because Newt is currently a patent-printing machine, and the stuff they’ve been doing with LMU Munich has added like a whole percentage point to the German economy. And that’s before any of it gets commercialized. Tonight, they don’t really talk about work. Jan’s eldest has recently moved out of home and his youngest is going through a ballet phase. Newt talks about Suresh’s soap classes and the expeditions they’ve been on with Alice, and some of the dumb things they got up to with Kaijute on his last visit.

Hermann isn’t gone long, maybe five minutes, and when he returns he takes Newt’s arm almost aggressively. Newt just laces their fingers together and kisses Hermann’s cheek with a, “Hey babe. All good? Need us to call Alice for you? Airlift or smashing; sexy husband’s pick.”

Reminding Hermann that they do, technically, have a kaiju (a small one, but still a kaiju) on call to smite their enemies whenever they feel like going full feral does, in fact, calm him down, and his face loses its pinched, lemon-sucking look.

“Tempting, but not tonight,” he says. “Father simply wanted to admonish me for my life choices; I imagine you can fill in the details.”

Newt sure can. Hermann spent most of his early twenties terrified of coming out to his stern, unyielding father, and had even gone on a string of mortifying arranged dates with the daughters of various elites in order to pacify him. It’d all ended rather humiliatingly thanks to an ill-timed visit to Hermann’s apartment one post-hookup morning. Subsequently—apparently motivated by a crushing urge to prove his son wrong in literally all things—Lars had wordlessly pivoted from attempting to set Hermann up with affluent young ladies to affluent young gentlemen, without fundamentally addressing Hermann’s main concern which was, to whit, none of said gentlemen being Newt, for whom Hermann had, at that time, harbored an enormous nerdboner.

The acceleration of the War—plus both Dietrich and Bastien settling down—had put a temporary stay on Lars’s matchmaking efforts. He’d attempted to restart them in the Interregnum though Hermann, no longer a young man (but, if Newt’s being honest with themself, definitely a heartbroken one), had shut them down pretty hard.

And now . . . this.

So. Yeah. Newt can kinda see how Lars may take exception to some of his son’s life choices. Just, like. Playing Precursor’s advocate for a moment or whatever.

There’s not much Newt can do about this issue right this exact second, though, other than maybe stand a little closer and let Hermann squeeze all the blood out of their fingers. And try and crack dumb jokes about the precarious little rich person food. It helps, maybe kinda, and Hermann relaxes and even smiles a little when Klöckner stops pretending to give them privacy and starts grilling Hermann on football predictions. (Hermann, utterly stereotypically and entirely secretly, kinda loves Fantasy Football and is amazingly good at it, in the way he’s amazingly good at anything that involves mathematical modeling. For the man who unlocked the secrets of the Breach, predicting fake sportsball is basically his equivalent of zoning out in front of _The Great British Bake Off_.)

At one point, while Newt’s busy being the attentively enthralled spouse to Hermann’s explanation re. offside modeling (which . . . what?), they catch Jasmine Lu’s eye across the ballroom. She looks at them, unflinching, and nods, and Newt thinks: _Okay._

* * *

Sit-down dinner starts at exactly eight p.m. and Newt actually has a nameplate: _Doctor Newton Geiszler, PhD (PPDC)._ More importantly, it’s actually sitting next to Hermann, who is actually sitting next to Lars, at a suspiciously empty table that actually makes Newt feel kinda bad.

Does Lars invite all his kids to these things? Do they all just never come, year after year? They should ask Karla about it, maybe, the next time they go to visit Dad. Or not. Probably not. They’re pretty sure they already know the answer and it’s just making _him_ depressed. Which, no thank you! They still have, like. At least three hours of this shit to get through, sans mental breakdown and-or any unnecessary bleeding.

 _hey dad dont freak out no reason but we love you okay?_ they text to Dad. Then they send a string of rainbow-colored heart emojis to Alice. Just because.

( _Love you too, Newtant,_ comes the reply. _I’m guessing you’re at Lars’ thing?_ Alice just sends them a screen full of hearts and a bunch of photos of the various Dstl personnel who’ve dared themselves to approach her.)

Dinner is a degustation from Heston Blumenthal’s, and it’s fine. Newt’s been here before so he’s had this before and, like. The meatfruit was cute the first time, and the Christmas-themed version is cute too, and it’s all very, like: _Remember when English cooking wasn’t totally inedible? Like before all the racism and whatever?_ So whatever. Michelin stars all ‘round. And, like. Yeah yeah yeah, affluenza, they’re an asshole, eat the rich, et cetera, et cetera. Herms is enjoying himself, though, and that’s what’s important. Like, legit what’s important. Newt’s eaten their way through like a hundred Michelin stars by now, easy, but the thing that was missing at every single one was sharing it with Herms. That stupid little giggle when he cuts into his “plum” and, sur-rr-rr-prise! It’s pâté!

God, it’s so dumb. And, fuck, they love him.

And then there’s Lars, sour-faced and implacable, watching them over the top of his 2014 Grüner Veltliner Smaragd. He looks old, old and frail, in a way Dad doesn’t. Dad’s younger, true, but there’s also a kind of . . . ruddy vitality to him. Dad is terrible home cooking and kisses on bruised knees and _I’m so proud of you, Newt_ and big warm hugs and a big warm chest to cry in. Lars is none of those things. Newt doesn’t even have to guess this; they know it, because _he_ knows it, from the Drift. And, suddenly, when they meet Lars’s eye across the table, Newt is struck by the realization that _Lars knows they know_.

Lars knows Newt knows he was a terrible fucking parent.Not just intellectually, but viscerally; Newt experienced it, through Hermann. Meaning Lars knows that not only can Newt compare Lars to Jacob but that _Hermann can too_ , because the Drift goes both ways. Hermann has a whole lifetime of memories, of feelings, of Dad and of Uncle Illia; knows what it feels like to be loved unconditionally and encouraged and supported, even at his worst. Lars has realized this, because Lars is not stupid and Lars knows how the Drift works, at least in the abstract sort of way someone who’s never experienced it “knows.” It was still enough. Lars saw himself through his son’s experience of someone else’s father, and knew—just _knew_ —he came up wanting.

And, worse, Hermann and Newt are married, meaning Jacob is Hermann’s dad now, too. Hell, Dad had considered Hermann family since way back, and Newt knows they’d bonded during the Interregnum. Meaning Hermann has another father figure to look up to; one who isn’t shy about lavishing praise (Dad basically thinks Hermann hung the stars and powers the sun, seriously).

So what, then, does that leave Lars? Old and bitter and alone, forsaken by his four children and, wow. Okay. Maybe that’s why Newt says:

“So, like. Dude. Joh tells me you’re back doing tender shit for the Corps.”

Hermann, who up until that moment had been fussily picking apart his meatfruit, freezes. Lars, meanwhile, blinks. Long, and slow. Eyeballs rolling like glaciers around to meet Newt’s. His mustache twitches, just once. Then:

“I didn’t realize you two knew each other.”

Newt scoffs, rolls their eyes. “Dude. We know, like. _Everyone_ here. Whether they’ll talk to us is another matter. But we’ve got mad dirt on JJ so . . . hey. Hot goss.” This is only nominally true; the “dirt” they have on Joh Johanssen is that he’s a massive cheat at golf, but considering they were all totally off their faces last time they played, it’s not exactly prime kompromat.

Lars gets that black-hole-nose look again, and when he speaks his voice sounds like someone trying to turn a long-rusted crank. “Well. He is correct. The Council has engaged me to lead the JumpHawk modernization programme.” Newt can _hear_ the extra letters at the end of that word. Snobby continental asshole.

Hermann, meanwhile, says: “I wasn’t aware the Corps was looking to replace its fleet.”

He turns to Newt, who shrugs. “JJ mentioned it just before. You gotta admit, the Hawks _are_ kinda falling apart.”

“Well . . . yes. But.” Hermann gets that look he gets when he’s Thought Of Something, and turns to his father. “Who, exactly, is the lead supplier?”

Lars _harrumphs_ into his mustache, settling back like he’s about to hold court. “Obviously we’re far to early in the—”

“It’s Shao,” says Newt, because of course it is. “They’re the market leader, supposedly, and Liwen’s been sniffing around the Council for months. Betcha anything it’s Shao.”

“Liwen is _supposed_ to be independent,” Hermann grouses, and Newt just rolls their eyes.

While they’re doing that, Lars narrows his own. “If you have . . . information . . .”

“Yeah, sure,” says Newt, because _oh boy, do they_. “You’re looking at the T280s, right? They’re . . . fine. Great. Didn’t even do anything sus to them. Just . . . boring-ass, solid as shit, dual rotor ‘pters.”

“But . . .?”

Newt shrugs, feigns nonchalance. “‘But’ nothing. You want roflcopters, they’re you’re best best.” A pause, for effect. “Can’t be beat on price, anyway.” A gamble, but . . .

“How so?”

 _Ding ding ding ding ding_. _Hello-oo-oo-oo, nurse!_

“Like, you’d be getting them for a steal, right? Everyone knows SI’s been scrambling desperately for big boy contracts after our little adventures in insurrection. Getting signed back on to mainline materiel for the PPDC would be, like. _The_ signal all has been forgiven, and their hardware’s been given the tick of kaiju-free approval. Like, they’re loss leading on the bid, surely? They’d be insane not to.” Funny, how Lars’s tells are so similar to his son’s (something which Newt will never tell Herms about ever because _love you babe hand heart_ ). Because, yeah. Newt had been guessing. But now they know; Shao had not, in fact, under-bid. Idiots.

“I . . . see,” says Lars. But he’s interested now, and Newt knows they’ve got him. This was their _job_ , for freak’s sake. For a decade. Of course they do.

“A few words in a few ears at the CCP,” Newt adds, just to spice things up, “and Shao will be bending over backwards to kiss the Corps’ ass. Like we said, _if_ you want helicopters, that’s the way we’d do it.”

“‘If?’” Lars isn’t stupid; he knows Newt’s playing him and he knows Newt knows he knows. But he’s interested all the same. Why wouldn’t he be? He might be a living legend among the PPDC old guard, who remember him as the father of the Jaeger program, but the old guard is dying off and dropping out, and to everyone else Lars is just the asshole that blew his wad on the Wall. The one Mutavore smashed the shit out of in like two seconds; the one Kaijue’s fam _help dismantle_ because it’s so easy for them compared to any human construction crew. Lars is batting one from two and needs another big win if he’s going to go down in history as anything other than a craven spendthrift.

So Newt shrugs. “Just sayin’, man. We didn’t fly here in a helicopter, yeah?” They lean back, gesturing expansively, and—

“Newton.”

Yup, there he is, right on cue.

“Wha-aa-aa’?” they say, all mock effrontery and extra whine. But when they make eye contact with Herms, he’s practically _sparkling_.

“Hermann?” Lars says, voice as threatening as a kaiju’s distant roar.

Hermann makes a frustrated _tsk_ ing sound and turns to his father. “There are . . . projects. Being conducted by K-Science. Prototypes for next-generation . . .” Hermann circles with his hand, like he’s trying to think of the word. “Fleet replacements,” he finally decides on.

“Which fleets?”

“All of them,” Newt blurts, then allows Herms to shush them back into their chair.

“I wasn’t told about this.”

Hermann turns back to his father. “The project is tremendously sensitive. But you must know the PPDC is focusing on technology shifts that can bring us victory in the Anteverse. The environmental factors there are . . . challenging. Alien, in the most literal sense of the term. K-Science is currently working almost exclusively on practical bioengineering”—nice, cute quote-unquote “slip” there, babe—“applications that will allow us to circumvent them. But the technologies, when they’re matured, will be dual purpose by their nature.” Kaiju fly just as well on Earth as they do in the AV, after all.

“I see,” says Lars. “And the JumpHawks?”

“There will always be a certain requirement for human transportation, of course. But I believe I can say with some surety that the PPDC’s days of needing helicopters to haul inactive Jaeger across the ocean are fast coming to a close.”

Lars processes this, brows drawn, mouth wholly vanished beneath his ‘stache. “Very well,” he says. “Humor me. What would _you_ do, in my position?”

This question actually throws Hermann, enough that he breaks character to shoot Newt a glance. Newt just gives him the most encouraging expression he can—it probably looks kind of deranged but, well, that’s nothing new—and when Hermann turns back to Lars it’s to say:

“Well. I, ah . . .” He stops, thinks. Tries again. This time, his voice starts slow, but picks up speed as he warms to his plan: “Well, we— we are maybe five years from . . . I’d hesitate to say ‘commercialization,’ but . . . wider deployment, perhaps. Ten at the most. Boeing could refit the existing V-50s quite trivially to cover that timespan, I’d think, and for a fraction of the cost of replacement. Perhaps not as luxurious a vehicle as the SI-T280s but we are the military, not a private jetliner.”

“I see,” says Lars, again, because it seems to be his go-to. He’s listening, though; really, seriously listening to his son, maybe for the first time in Hermann’s life.

It’s something Newt’s been noticing, interacting with Dad these last two years; they’re now kinda The Parent in that relationship. Like, Dad is still with it and active and independent and everything but just, very occasionally, he has reactions or does things that make Newt kinda stop and think, _Oh, wow._ Just dumb stuff, like getting flustered over types of milk in the supermarket or whatever, but it’s been kind of . . .

Newt was, like. Out. Of humanity. For a while there. And there’s still a big part of them—the part that isn’t _him_ —that finds The Human Experience™ to be wildly alien. It’s not like the Flesh has parents, or children, or even gets old exactly in the way humans do. The Flesh just _is_ ; ageless and eternal and sprawling. So it’s, like. _He_ kinda went to sleep circa mid-thirties and suddenly woke up middle aged, with an elderly parent and half a brain still struggling to even grasp the very concept of it. So it’s been kind of a wild ride.

And now, Hermann is getting the same thing. Minus the whole “rewired brain with aliens” part. Obviously. So just the “by Jove, Father is rather ancient, and I am rather more of a badass, aren’t I?” part.

And the part where Lars is maybe, just maybe, starting to accept that.

* * *

The rest of the night is kinda fine, after that. Lars and Hermann actually kind of manage to make almost-enjoyable small-talk over the smoked walnut mousse. Newt’s hand spends a lot of time under the table on Hermann’s knee, and both Gottliebs gets incredibly drunk from the wine pairings which, honestly, is probably helping them into their get-along shirt.

After sit-down dinner, everyone retires back into the entry area, now done up with a variety of lounges clustered around the enormous, overdone Christmas tree. The pianist that had been here before playing tasteful background music has apparently punched out for the night and so, while Herms is busy getting roped into boring conversations with more of his fanboys, Newt slips away and sits down and jumps into the solo arrangement of “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” he’s had memorized since, like, circa age fifteen.

This picks him up an audience of excited drunk rich people, who clap and clamor for more when he’s done, shouting out the names of things they want him to play. Newt immediately jumps into “All I Want For Christmas,” because knowing how to play classical piano arrangements of terrible pop songs Is Their Bag, Baby, and also because it results in a lot of terrible, slurred singing.

They throw in a few classics, too, as crowd pleasers, and “Oy Chanukah” to confuse the goyim, and don’t hide their wince when people yell out the slurs in “Fairytale of New York” a bit _too_ enthusiastically. At some point, Hermann comes to sit backwards on the bench next too them, which is nice (and, also, dude has kind of a sweet singing voice, when he feels like it). Someone bring them mugs of mulled wine, and Newt drinks one, because the champagne has long since worn off, and it’s nice to sit and play, pressed against Hermann’s side, nothing on their mind except the scroll of notes, flowing through their fingers. It’s transcendental, always was. Everything else falling away, burning mind calm and focused and in-sync. Just the sound and the joy.

They finish off with “Megalovania,” because why the heck not (they can tell who recognizes it by who laughs, the nerds), then beg off more, flexing cramping fingers. Also, they massively need to piss, so kiss Hermann on the cheek and go off to find somewhere to do that, preferably not a flowerpot or statue.

They’re somehow unsurprised when Lars corners them once they’re done, on their back into the ballroom.

“Doctor Geiszler.”

“Hey, dude. ‘Sup?” It’s not that Newt is afraid of Lars, exactly. Newt’s not afraid of much of anything, nowadays; partly because half their brain doesn’t really know how to _be_ afraid any more, but mostly because pretty much kinda the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to them already did, which really puts everything else into perspective. But Lars is still Hermann’s dad, and even though they don’t get on, Newt still knows he needs to be . . . careful. Around the old bastard.

“Your failures and humiliation have not taught you respect for your betters, I see,” Lars snaps which, _wow_. Just . . . wow.

Newt just hikes their brows. “Really?” they say. “That’s what you wanna do here?”

Lars gets this pinched look Newt recognizes as much as the back of their own hand. It’s Hermann about to blow his stack, two seconds from an epic snit, and if Newt had a dollar for every time they’d seen they’d be— Well. Not as rich as they currently are (and definitely not as rich as they _were_ ), but still doing pretty okay.

It gets exactly as far as Lars opening his mouth before it stops. Newt watches it stop, watches Lars forcibly stop himself. Calm himself down, close that bristle-broom pie-hole and take a deep breath and say:

“No. No, that . . . that’s not what we want to do.” Then, when Newt just gives a _lay it on us, then_ shrug: “You are an incredibly infuriating man. I will never see in you what my son does.”

“Masochism,” Newt answers, flippant and easy, because it’s not like they _don’t_ drive Hermann absolutely bananas on a regular basis.

Lars huffs like a freaking water buffalo. “You do not make this easy.”

Which, okay. “Look, pal, full offense but, like. We are not here to make things easier for _you_. We’re here to make things easier for Herms. Y’know, like. Our husband. Who gives us all the mushy gooey human heart-feelings. You might’ve met him.”

“You love him.” More of a threat than a question.

Newt has a glib answer to this, but catches it before it can roll off their tongue. Instead, they let _him_ say: “Hermann is funny and sweet and a genius and a good man, a great man. I’d be dead multiple times over if not for him. So yeah, I love him. I love him and owe him more than I can ever repay and he asks for nothing in return so the only thing I can try and do is make him happy. And I’ll do that, every day for the rest of my life, with my whole fucking heart, and it won’t even be a fraction of what he deserves.”

Lars blinks, physically stepping backwards in the way people tend to do the first time they see . . . that. The shift. _He_ is a roiling ball of passion—a hot messy tangle of love and fury and determination—beneath Newt’s skin, like if they looked and saw their tattoos moving and snarling and thrashing they wouldn’t even be surprised, bro. It’s jarring for them, those human feelings. Alien and unnatural. But they don’t fear or hate them like they used to, don’t try and push them away or bottle them up or bury them or have them explode outwards. Instead, they feel them, live in them. Let them flow through their flesh and bones, burning bright like Kaiju Blue.

And then they let them go. The bright flame passes, detritus cleared away, leaving a hot, tempered core of certainty in its wake.

Because yeah. They fucking love Hermann, all right.

And maybe some of it shows, in the too-bright blue of their eyes, and because Lars says:

“And is he? Happy. Is my son happy? I never— All I ever wanted for my children was the best. This world is cold, Doctor Geiszler. Cruel. You’ve seen that. It chews up kind men and soft men and spits them out, broken and lost. If I’ve been hard on Hermann it’s because I wanted only to protect him from the teeth and claws of a world that has no place for men like him, will find no—”

“Whoa whoa whoa gonna stop you right there, champ.” Newt holds up their hands in emphasis. “‘People like him?’ The fuck are you _talking_ about?”

“Don’t play dumb, Doctor Geiszler. You know my son’s disability—”

“Holy fuck. No. Uh-uh.” So, okay. This isn’t new. They _knew_ Lars was like this; _he_ knows it from the Drift and they know it because Hermann’s freakin’ told them. But Lars being an asshole to Hermann about his thing and Lars being an asshole to _Newt_ about Hermann’s thing are two very different things. “We are not having this conversation. You aren’t giving me this ‘oh my little cripple boy is so fragile’”—putting on his absolute worst Lars impersonation, just because—“‘he must know his place, in Daddy’s gilded cage’ bullshit. Go fuck yourself. Who the _fuck_ do you think you are?”

Lars, it must be said, is not a man who takes well to being told to go fuck himself. “I would ask you the same question.” Snooty motherfucker.

“We,” Newt says, letting the buzz into their voice, “are the Emissary. We took your world and took your technologies and we built ourselves an empire. We tore holes in your ocean and destroyed your armies and the only thing that stopped us—the _only_ thing—was your son. He stopped us by being smarter than us, braver than us, more resourceful than us. And, more than any of that, he stopped us by loving us, and reminding us we loved him and loved the Earth and loved all the dumbass people in it. So you just miss us with your Hobbesian red-in-tooth-and-claw bullshit. We had that whispered into our brain for ten fucking years and we are fucking _sick_ of it. It was wrong, and it fucking failed. It always does; gets beaten back again and again by the people people like you think of as weak. Because they love, and they care, and they have hope and they dream, and they hold hands and sing fucking kumbaya, and there are so many more of them together than there are of bitter old fucks like you. So to answer your question, _that_ is who we ‘think we are.’ And it’s who Hermann is, too.”

Mic drop, Newt out. They shoulder past Lars, ignoring the dude calling their name. Lars’s damage is his own and even if he is trying to be, like, a better dad or whatever, that’s between him and his conscience. Herms can decide for himself if he wants in on it, and Newt’ll be there to hold his hand regardless. And as for Lars, well. Forgiveness might be one helluva drug, but it doesn’t mean shit compared to putting in the work on yourself. Newt would fucking know.

They find Hermann back in the ballroom, making small-talk with someone in a PPDC uniform Newt doesn’t recognize. They must look sort of evil, and maybe the hug they give Herms is a bit _too_ huggy, because he says: “Newton? Are you alright?” Then, after glancing over Newt’s shoulder: “Did Father—?”

“We’re okay,” Newt says, because they are. The Blue in their veins has been cleared out by the effervescent froth they always feel, looking at Hermann, and . . . they’re okay. They’ll be okay. Lars is an asshole but Hermann’s a big boy, and a badass, and everyone loves him, and they’re all going to be okay.

* * *

They bail around midnight, after one final stiff farewell-and-thank-you to Lars. They’re mostly fleeing because Newt has started getting invitations to the various side-party parties where the drugs and the sex and the scandal are all happening. Something they’d have been all over in previous years, trying to numb the hole in their heart and the fire in their brain, and nothing that holds a candle to being able to go back to the penthouse with Hermann, strip down to their socks and jocks, and fall asleep.

They wake up just after dawn, because that’s kind of how their meat works, nowadays. It just doesn’t need as much sleep as it used to, either through age or habit or modification; they’ve never quite been sure and maybe it’s some combination of all three, and who cares, really, when they can just lie quiet and warm under the covers and watch Hermann drool onto the pillow.

He’ll be out for a while yet, so Newt does when they always do, and slips out of bed and gets dressed in their workout clothes—long pants and long sleeves this time, so as not to scare the gentry—and goes to find the gym.

Alice has sent them an absolutely baffling set of emoji overnight; various combinations of 💖🌙💗✨🍙💫💗🌙💖 that make no sense until Newt also scrolls through the photos as well. Apparently, the Dstl staff got wind of Newt mentioning Kaijute’s kaiju enjoying anime, snuck out after hours, set up a projector in front of Alice, and spent the night showing her the first season of the O.G. _Sailor Moon_. As far as Newt can tell, Alice’s favorite character is Sailor Jupiter (“🌸💚⚡️♃⚡️💚🌸”) and she now wants a pet cat (“⁉️💙🔜🐈⬛💙🖤💙⁉️”), so . . . thanks for that, Dstl people.

(Newt is not entirely adverse to the idea of a cat, and they don’t think Hermann would be, either. Considerations: They’re not entirely sure how Julie would react and, well. They live in the Shatterdome, which isn’t exactly pet-friendly. Maybe they could get a really, really old cat—like a rescue or whatever—and have it mostly just in their apartment? That could work, right? Hm. Make a note, definitely.)

The gym is empty when they get there, so they set up and pop in headphones and work through their regular morning shit: some sun salutations, then a WOD, then cool down. The meat doesn’t work like it used to before they fixed it; they don’t really get tired now, no matter how hard they go, but they also seem to have stabilized at a kind of semi-fixed metabolic point, strength- and endurance-wise. They spent three weeks once testing it by being lazy a.f.—no workouts, eating way too much junk food—and basically nothing changed (and ditto for the reverse) so, like. Technically they probably don’t _have_ to wake up at the crack of dawn every day like an asshole but, so sue them, it’s a habit and it does still jiggle out the ol’ serotonin. Plus their limbs get twitchy something awful if they don’t, so . . . asshole morning fitness it is.

They’re there about an hour, including all the time spent flaking out in Shavasana, thinking about nothing in particular, and definitely not Hermann’s asshole dad. Eventually, their stomach growling gets the better of them, and they roll upright and start collecting all their shit. It’s still too early for breakfast, but there’s water and apples set out in the gym’s lobby, and that will tide them over, at least until Herms rejoins the world.

They mean to go back to the room, they really do, but somehow they end up back outside the ballroom. Things are mostly packed up from last night, but the piano is still there, and the doors and open and no-one’s around and . . . fuckit. Why not?

So they play. They’ve been trying to do that more, since they’ve been back, but don’t always get the time, and last night reminded them they’re super fucking rusty. The days when _he_ dreamt of being a concert pianist are long behind them, but a minute of Googling and they’ve got a proper set of warm-ups; from scales and triads and arpeggios, then into Hanon, then just kind of . . . messing around.

They lose themself in it, like they always do. Like they did last night, but _more_ ; no longer playing for an audience, just themself. Stopping and starting whatever and whenever, pieces flowing into one another, half-remembered songs reconstructed and mashed together, from classical to pop to video game soundtracks and what they can remember of the theme to _Sailor Moon_ —they should play it for Alice, she’d like that—and time falls away until it’s just them and the keys and the morning sun, filtering in through the enormous, arched windows.

They’re most of the way through Schumann’s Piano Concerto when they feel someone else in the room, and when the last notes fade away they aren’t at all surprised to hear clapping. They turn, grinning and giving their most exaggerated bow, and Hermann says: “That was lovely. You really are very good.”

“Still out of practice,” Newt replies. “But getting better.” They don’t ask how Hermann found them. Over a decade and two whole alien species and sometimes—not all the time, but enough of the time—they both still just . . . know. Like they know where to find their own arm, even if they can’t see it.

“Mm. Modesty from a ‘rockstar.’” Hermann makes the air-quotes, the adorable asshole. “How very quaint.”

“Har har.” They close up the piano, standing and stretching, long and languid, just for Hermann’s sake. Then: “Breakfast?” The apple has just about worn off, and the hunger is back, so they offer their arm. Hermann takes it, and they kiss, soft and close and warm beneath the sunlight, just because they can.

Then they go get breakfast.


End file.
